The North British review

Ir has been a constant subject of regret with men of the world in our own country, that the social habits of France in former times (namely, the establishment of social intercourse upon intellectual bases) should never have been introduced into England. From Horace Walpole to Lord Holland, you meet everywhere with the strong feeling of French superiority, as far as the organization of society is concerned. It is quite clear that we envy the French their salons, and that directly an Englishman ceases to be an irreclaimable "sporting character," or to be riveted to the mere drudgery of political life, he is ready at once to exclaim, "Why don't we talk like the French? why are we so utterly ignorant of what they term la causerie?"

Now, at the same time with this, may be observed in France the disposition to cast a regretful, retrograde glance upon society as it once existed in that country, and to say with a sigh, "The real genuine salon exists no longer-it is extinct." From the sadness with which Frenchmen speak of the decline and fall of salon life, and from the regret expressed by Englishmen whom we have been taught to regard as of superior intelligence, that no such thing could be established in our own country, we might reasonably infer that the Paris salon was a social institution of importance and undeniable worth.

That the "salon," such as it was constituted in France from Madame de Rambouillet down to Madame Récamier, was one of the chief springs whereby the political and social machine was set working, is not a fact to be disputed; and therefore the institution" salon," is of importance. But from its de facto importance to its actual worth, and to the admission of its beneficial

VOL. XXXII. NO. LXIII.

influence, there is some distance. We do not think it easy to exaggerate the mere importance of salon life, as it once was, in France. The questions that depend immediately upon it are no less than these: the superiority of domestic over social influences, and vice versa; the more or less active power of women in public affairs; the respect for intelligence, or the subserviency to wealth; the substitution of coterieism for public opinion, and several others we could name. Because all these questions bear upon the morals of a nation, and have mainly contributed to fashion the public life of France to what we now see, we maintain that le salon, as the term was understood some years back by our neighbours, is a thing of very great importance, and ought to be studied by all who wish to obtain an accurate knowledge of French civilization as it has been and is.

Whether our inability ever to found the salon-sovereignty in our own society be, or be not, to be regretted,-that, we take to belong to a different order of topics, and to be subject to a different system of discussion.

The first salon established in France (for in social life especially Paris is France) was that of Madame de Rambouillet in 1620; the last one was that of Madame Récamier. What precedes the former, and what follows the latter, are equally without action, and undeserving of note. The great Revolution of '89-'93 has passed between the two epochs, and has torn up out of the political soil all the roots wherefrom other nations draw their political existence. A crown has been shattered, a noblesse suppressed, and the most insane theories set up in lieu of the humbler devices of practical experience. Yet between the Hotel Rambouillet and the Abbaye aux Bois there is an astonishing likeness; and assuredly, if any very considerable changes have been wrought by events upon the mass of the French race by the century and a half which extends from the middle of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth age, such changes have not told upon the two types of female supremacy denominated la Marquise de Rambouillet, and Madame Récamier. These two women are terribly alike,-terribly, for they ought to be so dissimilar. Both of them might have made their daily toilette in that bright apartment,

"Sacred to dress, and Beauty's pleasing cares,"

of which we are told in the fourteenth book of the Iliad as having been built with "skill divine" by Vulcan for Imperial Juno. They are no more simply, naturally, women than that comes to. Their home is in Olympus; and well might a witty Frenchman of the present day say, "You are trying now to make a saint out of Madame Récamier; but it is in vain. Ce n'est pas une sainte, c'est une deésse." She is so-a goddess belonging to that

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